Children's Bureau: Federal Inter-Agency Work Group on Child Abuse & Neglect: Webinars: Positive Parenting Is Key to Preventing Child Maltreatment

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Storytelling, Social Movements, and the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect
Prevention Webinar Presented by the
Federal Interagency Work Group on Child Abuse and Neglect
January 28, 2010

Presenter: Ben Tanzer, Senior Director of Strategic Communications, Prevent Child Abuse America.

Melissa Brodowski: [00:12] My name is Melissa Brodowski, and I'm the Prevention Specialist at the Office of Child Abuse and Neglect [OCAN] at the Children's Bureau, and for those that may not be familiar, we're located in the Administration for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, DC.

So we're just thrilled, and I'm so pleased to welcome you, to our Prevention webinar today on Storytelling, Social Movements, and the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect.

And just so pleased to have Ben Tanzer, the senior director of Strategic Communications from Prevent Child Abuse America [PCA], here to share their great work and really they've been a leader around this whole issue of reframing how we talk about, and take action to prevent, child abuse and neglect. We recognize that this is actually a very critical issue for the field right now in prevention and in particular during these difficult economic times.

The importance of really making the case for prevention and the role that we can all play is critical, and so we're just really excited to hear about what Prevent Child Abuse America has been doing and learning about the science and the evidence about how best we can communicate about what we do to try to prevent child abuse and neglect.

So before we get started I just wanted to share a little bit of background about the webinar and these webinars. Several of you have probably joined them in the past, but we've been hosting these monthly Prevention webinars and started out really as a task of our Prevention subcommittee of the Federal Interagency Workgroup on Child Abuse and Neglect.

I want to acknowledge Jean Nussbaum from our office who's really had the lead in coordinating and scheduling these webinars. Some of you may know our office has the lead on Federal Interagency collaborative efforts related to child abuse and neglect. And there's been a Federal Interagency Workgroup on Child Abuse and Neglect since the 1980s. We have over 40 different Federal agencies represented, and in 2008 we started the Prevention subcommittee as a way to bring together the Federal staff from different agencies who share this common interest.

So we have folks from several different agencies: the Center for Disease Control (CDC), Division of Violence Prevention in particular, they're a key partner in this work and also a partner with Prevent Child Abuse America on their Knowledge To Action Child Maltreatment Prevention Consortium (K2A). Maternal Child Health and SAMHSA, NIH, the Department of Defense, a whole host of other Federal agencies are involved, and we're just very excited about that. And we also work with our national prevention organizations through our national prevention partners network. And Prevent Child Abuse America in particular has been working with us closely in the last several years to provide input and help us develop and disseminate our Prevention resource guide [Strengthening Families and Communities: 2010 Resource Guide, at www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/res_guide_2010], which some of you may know.

Anyway, we're just excited about all the work that's happening both at the Federal level and non-Federal level so we hope that these calls and webinars we've been hosting really help the field learn more about what's happening. So as I said earlier we're just thrilled at the level of interest in today's webinar and know that there are several hundreds of folks from across the country, really, and nice to see several of our prevention grantees represented as well as representatives from various State and local agencies across the country.

So just wanted to share a couple of logistical notes before we begin. This call is being recorded, and it will be posted along with the slides after this webinar. And then, as you heard earlier with the operator coming on, this call is operator assisted, so all the lines are muted. And then there'll be points probably along the way that if folks have questions, then we'll ask the operator to open the lines. So pay attention to those periods.

Again, I really want to thank you for joining us for this webinar. I really, really enjoyed working with Ben Tanzer over the last several years. I think he's going to have a lot of really important information, and you'll get a lot out of the experience and information he has to share as well as he's a very engaging presenter, so I think you'll enjoy that. Anyway, so, I'm going to pass it along to Ben. I think Jean is going to get his slides up on the screen and … Thanks, everyone.

Ben Tanzer: [05:00] OK, hey, Jean, do you need to say anything, or should I just pull the screen up?

Jean Nussbaum: [05:04] You can just pull your screen up, Ben.

Mr. Tanzer: [05:06] Very cool, all right. So I'm going to go to slide show and—if it lets me.

Hello, everybody. This is, as Melissa introduced, Ben Tanzer. I'm thrilled to be on the phone with you today. I understand there are 4,000 or 5,000 people out there, that's great. Can everybody, I guess Jean and Melissa, can you see the slides OK? The opening slide?

Ms. Nussbaum: [05:30] Yep, we sure can.

Mr. Tanzer: [05:01] Amazing. OK, that's great.

We are on the phone together for the next hour and a half. I think my idea is we'll … I will present for around and hour. I will try to pause and take questions as best we can. This is certainly not the easiest way to do that, and so I also want to let folks know that if we don't get to your questions, if it's too hard to get into your question, I will certainly be available by email, phone call after this call, and I'm always available to speak on any topics around the communications work we're doing or some of the other pieces we're doing.

I want to thank Melissa and Jean for the invitation today. They've both have been wonderful to work with, and it's an honor to help out with this. We're very excited about the things we're working on, but they are are certainly only as valuable as people's ability to utilize the information and implement the information, so I'm always excited to share that.

What I want to do, and what I will do, and what we'll lay out over this presentation is I want to make sure folks are reminded and/or up-to-speed or hearing for the first time the initial sort of research we did around messaging and communications. I then want to get you up to where the most current research is, and when I mean most current I mean literally in the last several months—some of which some people may have heard, others may not have heard at all.

And what I'd also like to do is use that as a platform or as an opportunity to sort of put communications and messaging and reframing, which is the subtext of all this, into a larger context though of what we need to do to make change. To even boldly seek to create more of a movement around child abuse and neglect. A movement that engages not just policymakers or partners but the larger public where, I think, we have significant challenges.

[07:30] So with that, I'm going to jump in, and again, glad to be here, looking forward to talking to all of you, though I understand I'll be partially talking at you, when this starts. But I think one of the key places to start, and one of the key places we should always start when we talk about our work—the work of prevention—but also the larger work of engaging people in prevention: asking why the public doesn't take more responsibility for social change in the first place.

I think we can argue that we've had an array of successes over the years. In recent years, you know, there hasn't just been a push for more evidence. But there's actually more evidence or more things we know that work, at least work in certain places around prevention—that's exciting. There are more people interested in this cause. These are good things, you know, public awareness remains very high with this serious problem.

But, why doesn't child abuse and neglect sort of have the same attention as breast cancer and Susan G. Komen? Why don't we have sort of an identity similar to LIVESTRONG or the work of other causes? Why does the environmental movement, for example, have so much more traction than we do?

One argument, and I think it's an important argument, is that this is sort of a cognitive failure—that people don't understand what their responsibility could be. I tend to call this the father-in-law rule. I have worked at Prevent Child Abuse America for 11 years. I've been in the field for going on 20 years, and my father-in-law still asks me what it is I do. And—what it is he could do. And he'll always remind me that he would do more if I told him what to do.

So, clearly, I've been failing to communicate to him, and I think that's representative of a larger challenge we have. This cognitive failure for people to be engaged is really, arguably, a communications failure on our part. And when I say "our part," I mean the field. We have not successfully shown people what their responsibility could be. And so I really want to stress something here, something worth dialoging about, here and beyond.

Communications per se does not prevent child abuse and neglect. Reframing per se does not prevent child abuse and neglect; but I think our challenge is we have a bigger struggle preventing child abuse and neglect, much less a lot of things, if we can't get more people to the table—if more people don't see that they have an active role in children's lives and the lives of communities. So I think this is where our failure is most strong, and this is what I want to build on today.

[10:18] If you go to the next slide, if we go to the next slide, let's see here. The next slide is not moving, now why would that be? There it goes, sorry. It was stuck for some reason, I don't know why that was. I blame my laptop for the moment.

If we talk about this as a cognitive failure, I think that we have to talk about, and what I've been sort of alluding to, is that the communications we use are inadequate. That people don't understand what we're talking about, and, I know this is greatly simplified, but they default to the pictures in their head. And I want to take a moment on this, and many of you may have heard this already. I don't think we could say it enough.

People sort of readily identify or have associations with just about anything we can talk about. People actively have a file cabinet in their heads, and they are constantly shuffling information in and out. People are being constantly inundated with information. You know, if we were together, I might ask for a show of hands—it is 2:15 here in Chicago, but I might ask all of you, how many of you have been online today? Or read the newspaper? Sent an email? Sent a text? Tweeted? Blogged? Facebooked? Got on your cell phone? These are all things we do all day long.

Read the newspaper, which, I know, is old fashioned. Read a book, talk to someone. We are constantly taking in information, and our brain is constantly trying to shuffle that. The challenge we have is that if we don't communicate what it is we're trying to say in the way we want to say it and the way people need to hear it, they are going to default to the pictures in their head.

One of the arguments we'll make here over the next hour is that the pictures in people's heads around child abuse and neglect and prevention are not the pictures you want them to have. And not just that, but those pictures, those ideas, undermine our ability to do good prevention work. So [I] really want to stress the importance of words, and how thoughtful we are, and understand that every one of us is sort of a messenger and an advocate—ultimately an ambassador for prevention, in that the public hears what we are doing, and we have the potential to lead them in one direction or another, and so, of course, the second bullet point here is very crucial.

When communications are effective, people can see an issue from a different perspective. I would argue, and we'll show you that the research does support, that we really need people to see prevention from different perspectives.

[12:57] So. History, let me give you a brief piece of history. We rolled out a campaign back around 2003, 2004 with a series of images like the one I hope you're seeing on your computer. This particular image is a [stove's electric] burner. The both explicit and implicit message here is that some children are punished or abused in such a fashion: hands on burners. Personally I've always thought this was a horrific ad. It was a sister ad to a closet image and a bath image. The point here, I think there are many points, is that the intent is to scare people into caring about child abuse and neglect and to scare people into caring about prevention.

There was a lot of money put into this campaign, and this campaign got a wide distribution. This campaign was pulled almost immediately. It was considered an enormous failure. The public roundly rejected it. It was not getting … not just not getting the traction we might have wanted, it was something that people got very upset about. And we had to pull it immediately.

You know the problem with that, of course, is that left us with no campaign, and a lot of spent money, and no real insight into what we needed to do differently.

At the time we then reached out to our funder, and we said, "Look, we spent this money. We were unsuccessful, but we haven't spent all the money. Is it possible we could do something different with this funding?" And at the time we had come into contact with an organization in Washington, DC, who I think are much bigger and more popular now—not that they weren't doing good work already—called the FrameWorks Institute.

And the FrameWorks Institute works with social causes, not just ours but causes around education and race and voting. And they are people who work with folks on messaging. And they are people who talk to folks like all of us about what we may be doing well or not well around communications and the failure to communicate what we're doing.

[15:20] Our funders supported our efforts to move forward, in an essence, find out if there was a way to reframe the kind of messaging and the kind of advertising we were doing. The idea was, could we drive people to think about the work differently? Could we offer an alternative way to think about the work?

So, let me share this with you. This is in part to make sure you believe I have some street cred. But this is the research timeline that we have been engaged in over the last several years. I will show you where you can access this research. But, just so you know, we've been working with FrameWorks, and with FrameWorks leading these efforts they did a series of research studies for us. All sorts of things from community to family to the frames around child maltreatment. In essence the unintended consequences. What sort of frames were we driving? And that worked was very heavy around 2003, as you can see. We then had a bit of a break for a variety of reasons, and then we picked this research back up from 2008 and into 2009.

So what I'm going to do is give you a handle on what we did in 2003, and then I'm going to talk to you about how things have changed and where they've gone recently, and how we've sort of buffed up what we were talking about then.

Just so you know, and I'm guessing Jean will make PDFs available to you, if I recall. You know when I do the FrameWorks … when I touch on FrameWorks research directly, I tend to use their slides. I want to be protective of the fact that this is work that they did on our behalf. So I just want to make that clear. You'll see the change in slides, that's very purposeful.

But I'm going to back up first again. I think some of you have heard this, but I'm going to talk about it anyway, and we're not going to spend a lot of time on it, but I think it's important. I mean, this is about how people hear what we're talking about. It's a big deal, and it's something, though, that I think intuitively we can all piece through. But the first thing—and when we say framing, we're really talking about how we tell our story. But this is framing, regardless of our issue. But order is a big deal, and I really want to stress this because this is something we were not doing well in the past. I think we're doing better now.

If we're going to tell a story about child abuse, we're going to tell a story about prevention. And I will talk to you about what that story might look like in a couple of minutes. But if we're going to tell a story, we need to start with what the framers would call level 1. The big ideas. The values that people hold in this country, and some of those values that we know sort of test well are things like prosperity.

People want to live in a prosperous country; I mean, personally, I think that's more than finances, though certainly given the state of the economy in the last year, I don't doubt that there's a lot of it that has to do with finances. People want to live in a society and a country that's prosperous. They're interested in living in a society that, and I think this is particularly American, though not only American, where ingenuity is a value, that we make things here; we create things, and we are successful in doing so.

So these are values that people hold and our obligation is to tell stories that focus on these values and open with these values as a means for bringing people into the story.

[18:30] The next part of any story is going to be talking about the specific issue that we focus on; in our case that's child abuse. You can extend that, I think, to families and brain development, child development. Of course for other causes it might be health or other issues. And in level 3 is where we talk about our specific policies and solutions.

Mental health services, for example, for mothers who might have postpartum depression; respite care for families that are stressed; expanding SCHIPs [State Children's Health Insurance Programs] so more kids are developing in a healthy fashion. That's the level 3. And what I really want to encourage all of you to do is, throughout this call and as you think about how you do business, again, I want to keep stressing: We are all messengers. We are all ambassadors for the field.

How do you tell your story? Whether it's to a funder, whether it's to a neighbor, whether it's in your church or temple, whether you're on a plane. I get a lot of that, with all the traveling I do. How do you tell your story? Keep thinking about that, please, as we go along.

Similarly, you know, and I think some of this reminds me of my son who is now in second grade, but some of this, also, then telling the story, I have to do sort of creating the right causal chains or links. We need to show people not just what we think the solutions are, but we need to draw the whole story from the causes of child abuse through the solution.

I think there is an assumption for many of us that people understand what we're talking about—and I would like to dispel that feeling or that belief. I think we should assume people don't really know what we're talking about when we talk about prevention. And I'm going to talk more about that. And [they] don't understand the solutions, and [they] certainly don't see how the causes of abuse or other things are dealt with based on the solution. So when you're telling your story, connect the dots for folks. I really want to stress that. It's a big deal.

Going on to the next slide, building on the sort of framing piece. The elements that of any story all of which we will touch on, and I've already started touching on, are: Do we have values? Ask yourself: Are you using values when you talk about child abuse? There need to be the issues, I'm guessing a lot of people talk well about the issue. There need to be metaphors and models. I think—this is an area we're still working on, but I will touch on what we think some of these metaphors are.

And when I'm talking about metaphors, you know, I'm talking about things like what the environmental movement has done very successfully over the years. They used to talk about the ozone layer, and no body knew what that was. We all sort of think that we know what it is now, but there was a time when it got a lot of blank stares. Probably much the way you get at times when you talk about your work. When we talk about the work.

So, what the environmental folks did was, they started saying, "Hey, what happens when you have a hole in the roof of your house or apartment or your home, where you live?" People say, "Well, you know, the elements get in, dirt gets in, dust comes in, people's garbage could fly through"—and they said, "That's the ozone layer." When you have a hole in the ozone layer, it's like having a hole in the roof of your house, and the Earth is your house. People really started getting that because what they had, and I want to push this image as well, is they had a visual to go with the story. So we all have to think about those things.

Finally, solutions. We need to share the solutions. I would argue that we have as many solutions as ever to talk about. And I've said this already, but there is more evidence, there are more things going on, there are more solutions we can talk about, and I'm not sure we do that often enough. Now, does that mean everyone on the phone, that applies to everybody? No, not at all, but I do think we need to spend some time thinking about solutions and making sure people understand what prevention is. And I'm going to talk about that in a second. This is all sort of building up to that.

[22:10] Now I'm going to spend some time on the initial research we did, then I'll take some questions if we can, and if it's too chaotic we will wait. But, you know, the framing folks talked to us about what they try to do, and those are the slides I was just on. Then they talked to us, going back to some of those 2003 studies, they talked to us about what we weren't doing, what they were learning about the field, what we needed to think about.

And what they found—which I don't think is going to surprise people, but I do want to say it. And I want to say it again and again—that as a whole, again, as a whole, the public has sort of three related frames to our work. So when they're shuffling their brain when you're talking about child abuse or the work you do, this is were people's brains land.

First off, some folks think of abuse as a horrible, criminal atrocity. And this is important. Regardless of your personal opinion about people who abuse—if we paint parents, caretakers, whomever, friends, neighbors as monsters, it is very hard to talk about prevention because people don't think monsters can be served or supported or helped. And so I want to stress that that is a challenge for us.

People also associate our work, child abuse and neglect, with a failure of CPS, child protective services, or child welfare, whatever you call it in your State. That is a problem for us. Again, regardless of your feelings about CPS and who you work with, it is the only solution most people think they know, if they know it at all. And they think of it as a failure. If the only solution they know about is considered a failure, again, it is very tricky for you to talk about all the wonderful things you're doing or could be doing.

Finally, and I know this is shifting in different places, and I've heard this is shifting in Massachusetts, which is wonderful, but you know, people really believe that there is a prevalence of sexual predators in our midst. And when I say this, what I'm trying to say is that people believe that children are regularly snatched off the street. I don't want to minimize that, I know that happens. But we also know, we know research supports that 90, what, upwards of 90 percent of most sexual abuse cases are the strangers we know. Not the strangers we don't know.

And yet the myth of stranger danger is sort of endlessly perpetuated in the media and even in some of our programming. This is a challenge for us. Again, very hard to talk about prevention when people are scared that their kids are going to be snatched off the street. Now again, I don't want to minimize the fact that that happens. And I'm a parent of young children, and I know this is a trigger of mine. But we need to focus on this.

We also need to focus on the fact that safety is not a bad word to use as messengers. But when people think about safety, and when we focus on safety, we push people to think about the fact that maybe—maybe—their communities aren't that safe, that there are these strangers in their community and that they need to protect their children from their own community. And some of you may feel that way about your children. I mean, I have that feeling all the time. Any time we get a new neighbor, we all have to fight that [feeling] to the extent that, if people are scared of their community, it makes it very hard to do prevention work. So I just wanted to stress that.

Another thing we learned—which could be hard for some folks on the phone, it's hard for a lot of people—is that when we use, when we start our conversations with negative statistics and data about how many kids die a day, how many are abused, how many reports there are in your State, how many are substantiated versus not substantiated—when we do this, when we show pictures of kids who are abused (and we've all seen them), when we do this, we are driving people to the frames I just described. These are triggers for people. We need to avoid that as much as possible.

[26:06] Now does that mean, "Excuse me, we're supposed to avoid statistics and data?" Absolutely not. But it needs to be later in the story. People need to be drawn into a conversation about something, and then you can support it with data. I'm telling you now that we know, again and again, research shows us, that when we come out trying to scare people and make them be aware of how bad things can be, we lose them.

Now you might say, "Well, I don't think that's the case. You know, I was in a meeting the other day and …" I want to stress this [was said by] a member of a board who's doing some work for us, a community person; he said to me: "I don't understand why we can't build a story around every child abuse case in the newspaper." He goes, "I hear those stories, and all I want to do is make a difference."

And you know, I celebrate that guy. I know you all have board members and volunteers like that. What I want to stress, and the sort of epiphany I had when this guy was speaking, is that: He is not the norm. Most people see those cases, hear those stories, listen to Nancy Grace, whatever, and they run in the other direction. And so we can't worry about the 5 or 10 percent of people who really hear these stories and get energized. My concern is everybody else, which is what I told this guy. I said, "You're special, but you know, if you can't draw 15 of your friends here for this discussion, that's our challenge." And that is our challenge. Which is: How do we draw people in, not push them away?

[27:25] Here's a couple of other things we've learned, then I'll pause for, like, 5 minutes. But we as a field tend to start at level 3. I talked about levels—we tend to talk policy. Or we talk about what we do in terms of our programs and what's on the ground. We need to celebrate those things. But when the conversation starts at level 3 and not at level 1 in terms of values, we lose people. I want to stress that. People are not able to grasp a policy conversation without some context. And a lot of stuff we do can be defined as policy.

I always use this example for folks who watched the Gore-Bush debates. Whatever side of the argument you're on, whatever side of that campaign you were on, you know—the public certainly found that Vice President Gore lost the first and even the second debate: the broad public. One of the things we learned, or what we saw later, or what was deconstructed, was that Vice President Gore was talking policy. You might recall the conversation about putting Social Security in a lock box. He was having a policy discussion, and people couldn't or wouldn't follow him. You know, the presumptive nominee, President Bush—he talked about values. Now it doesn't matter whether you agree with his values or not. He spoke in a language that the public was interested in, and he drew them into a conversation.

So I want to push this. We need to do the same thing. Similarly, this is a big idea, and I ask anyone on the phone to think about their own family or [themselves]. You know, the public really struggles with the concept called the "family bubble," and this is a FrameWorks concept, and I want to push it.

This is the idea that we shouldn't tell families what to do. Not that we shouldn't tell families what to do but that families in many ways are insular and autonomous entities that are none of our business. Now again, not sure how you feel about that. I know for myself I never tell my sister-in-law … give her any advice about parenting. I'm really scared of her.

But the challenge there is if you can't convince people, or if you can't talk about families, you can't talk about prevention. And this is a conflict, and we need to address it as we speak, and as we talk about what we do.

Now when we left off in 2003, which all of a sudden seems like a long time ago, FrameWorks is saying, there are four areas we'd like to explore in more depth with you, and of course, universes change dramatically even in our field in the last 5 or 6 years. But they said family strengthening is something you should look at. Now what I find amazing is, of course, that phrase has really, that phrasing has really taken off.

What I want to stress here—and this may be the most provocative thing I say, but I don't intend it to be, really—is that family strengthening and the ideas behind the sort of family strengthening movement and the protective factors that are being discussed everywhere these days, are incredibly valuable and are incredibly useful for the work we want and need to do. But the phrasing around stronger families, strengthening families, family strengthening—it is very, very tricky, and we need to be careful.

Policymakers may eat that up and that is great, but the public—when we push ideas like family strengthening, they think about the family bubble. And then they think they don't want to know any more about what we're talking about. For some people it also sort of engenders the idea that "I never thought parents were strong enough to begin with." You're just sort of reasserting that there's nothing we can do, that parents aren't doing their job. And that's a big deal. I think that's working against us.

Similarly, prevention was a frame that seems like an obvious frame to talk about this work. It is a challenge though. People do not understand what prevention is, and this is on a variety of levels. For some they don't understand what you do. But for others they literally don't understand the concept.

Some of this is generational [with] people who grew up in a universe before HMOs, before proactive health care, and other things. You got sick, you got hurt, you went to the doctor—there was nothing proactive about it. Prevention is about being proactive. Prevention is about stopping something before it occurs. That is a significant, for lack of a better phrase, paradigm shift in the world we live in. But it does make it difficult to talk about prevention.

At the time, we weren't all talking early child development yet, and FrameWorks suggested that was something we should look at. I think we know how that's turned out. It is being looked at all the time; it is incredibly valuable.

[31:50] Finally, another frame to talk about briefly is community. Community has to be part of the conversation. But has to be of part of the conversation in terms of context. We need to avoid sort of pushing people to get nostalgic about the communities they grew up in. When people get nostalgic about the communities they grew up in, they get lost as far as what might serve communities today.

And I ask anyone to think about how many times they've heard someone say, "You know, in the community I grew up in, if you were getting in trouble, neighbors called neighbors. It isn't like that anymore." Those communities may or may not have existed, but they likely don't exist now, and what we can't have is a conversation about what it once was.

We have to look forward, and the way we need to look forward is the various things you all are already doing. Now again, I'm not discouraging the idea to push neighbors to talk to neighbors. What I'm saying is nostalgia is not helpful for us, and it comes up a lot in these conversations.

So, Carla, are you on the phone, still?

Carla: [32:46] Yes, sir.

Mr. Tanzer: [33:49] Awesome. Can we have maybe an open line for like 5 minutes?

Carla: [33:51] Yes, thank you.

Mr. Tanzer: [32:53] Let me know when that 5 minutes is blowing by if I'm not paying attention.

Carla: [32:56] OK, thank you, if you'd like to ask a question at this time please press star 1. One moment please for our first question.

[Silence. No response.]

Mr. Tanzer: [33:20] Does that mean there aren't any questions?

Carla: [33:22] At this time, sir, there are no questions.

Mr. Tanzer: [33:24] No problem, and there is nothing like trying to do the pregnant pause when you can't see anybody's faces, but ahh …

Carla: [33:29] Actually, we did have one question and …

Mr. Tanzer: [33:31] OK, great.

Carla: [33:39] Dr. Norris, your line is open.

Dr. Norris: [33:41] Hi, how are you doing?

Mr. Tanzer: [33:43] Fine, thank you, hello.

Dr. Norris: [33:45] Could you kind of boil down everything you've said into a few sentences for me?

Mr. Tanzer: [33:50] We're going to build on this in this next section, but if I were to boil this down, what I would encourage you and us to think about is that the way we have done communications historically was very successful in raising awareness. It has not been … it is now not as successful in engaging the public.

We need to tell a different story, a story that's embedded in the values people hold that allow us to have a conversation about children and families and the kind of programming we would like to provide. We need to avoid as best we can certain phrasing that pushes people in directions we'd rather not push them. It is very tricky to talk about families, I know that's contradictory, but we need to stress that.

Early child development, while is as popular as ever, is a very good opening to get people into a conversation. And I will talk more about what the story could look like in the next couple minutes. How's that?

Dr. Norris: [34:51] Good, cause I'm calling from Florida, and we just had a big increase this year in our level of child abuse, so it's important.

Mr. Tanzer: [34:59] But there's probably, and Melissa can probably lead a 10-hour, separate conversation on what it means when we see increases—everything right from redefining the issue to better public awareness to changes in reporting. But I know there is an increase, and obviously anytime there is an economic … or a stress on the economy and on families, you know communities are at risk.

So yeah, let's go forward and talk some more, and I really want people to sort of jump in and push back and say, Well, I haven't tried that, I have tried this. And the other thing I would stress, and then we'll move on, is that we have also historically focused—and this maybe something for you to think about in Florida—we have historically focused on individual change. Sort of fixing families one at a time. I’m going to talk more about this in a moment.

I think—and I think this is something that the Centers for Disease Control would jump in on this conversation—we need to think on a societal, community, statewide level. I really want neighbors to knock on neighbors' doors. And again, as a parent of young children, when neighbors have knocked on our door and asked us how we're doing, I am endlessly appreciative. But I think our goal needs to be: How do we get neighbors to take action on behalf of neighborhoods and communities?

And that needs to be the conversation. If my neighbor knocks on my door, great. If my neighbor says to me: "What can we do to bring home visiting to this neighborhood in Chicago?" then that's a larger victory. I think we sometimes don't think about what that larger victory might look like.

So, hey, Carla, with that, if you don't mind cutting it off, we'll go forward, but we'll keep picking up this theme for Dr. Norris as well.

[Pause]

Mr. Tanzer: [36:42] OK, cool, so I'm going to jump ahead. So, fast forward a couple years. Our research [is] getting rounded out, and here's some of the things I've already said, so I'm going to flesh them out over these next several slides.

More than ever, or as much, families, the ideas of family autonomy and the family bubble are significant ideas and struggles for you, for us, for our work. People are very … find it very challenging to talk about what we can offer families. But there's another piece of this too, and I think this is significant, and I touched on it.

There really is a vibe—I think this is somewhat of a shift; I know I feel it anecdotally as a parent—but [the vibe is] that parents are solely responsible for their children's behavior. That if a child isn't doing well everywhere from, you know, in a restaurant (which we've all had that experience—which is why I avoid restaurants with my kids) to kids who are getting … are dropping out of school or engaging in violence. Whatever is going on, there is a sense that parents don't discipline their kids correctly.

Again, whatever your opinion on that is, that's fine. But here's the challenge as prevention folks, people working in this field. We cannot have the public focus solely on parents and parent responsibility. People need to think about the fact that children live in environments outside of the home and that there are actors in children's lives outside of parents.

Parents are not solely responsible for children, and you can push back on me and say—you can say anything you want—"But it comes down to parents." I think that's fine. But I will remind you that your kids, our kids, the kids in our neighborhoods, have contact with crossing guards, teachers, principals, coaches, pastors, rabbis, clerks in stores, homeless people on the street, whatever it is—they are constantly interacting with people outside of parents.

So parents are not solely responsible for children, and they're certainly not solely responsible for child development. Just like the family and the home isn't the only place that children exist. They go to museums, they go to school, they go to restaurants, they go to supermarkets, they go to sports.

I was in a meeting recently, and someone said to me, "I live in a really rural part of my State"—I apologize I don't remember what State it was—she said, "and our kids really don't have contact with a lot of people." And I said, "Well, that's interesting," I go, "but why don't you break down how many people your kid might have contact with?" And this person walked through the list. Well, there was the crossing guard, and the librarian, and the coach, and the teacher, and the neighbor, and the local police officer—anyway, and so there were at least five or six people that any kid has had contact with every day of the week.

My point is, we need to tell a story regardless of what we believe—that our kids live in a larger environment because those environments play a role and that allows us to talk about prevention.

Similarly people are very focused on safety. Again, I don't want to … You know someone recently said to me, "Well, talking about safety is better than talking about some of the things we used to talk about." That's true. But the problem is, safety invokes protecting kids from harm and disease. That's how people think about safety. Again, that's fine, except that that doesn't help your efforts to talk about prevention. When people think about safety, they're trying to protect their kids from that stranger they don't know. They're worried about swine flu and a million other things. Again, are these bad things? Not at all, but they don't allow you to talk about what you do. We occupy a particular niche in a child's life. And we've got to figure out how to talk about our niche.

[40:12] Again, I already touched on this: "If kids don't do well, parental discipline is the reason." This is a problem for us; again, it has nothing to do with your feelings about discipline. I would never get into a discussion about what's the right form of discipline regardless of my opinion. But I want to stress that kids don't only exist in the realm of parents and home.

And then finally, you know, when people talk about solutions, when they're pushed, when you get them maybe past a conversation about CPS or child welfare, the main thing they tend to talk about is parent education. Nothing wrong with parent education, of course; we all need it, we need to support it, and as a parent I'm glad when I get it.

But we need people to have a conversation about policy. It's not enough to educate one parent at a time. We need to pass policies that effect communities as a whole. And this is where we get stuck.

So with that in mind, I want to talk about the story we've been trying to build. Now, you may hear some of this and think, man, I can't do that, I can't use all those words. I can't think all that way, but I really ask you to read this and digest it and think about it.

[41:10] Here's sort of a seven-part story in sort of order cause we talked about "order matters." What you will see is everything I've been talking about for the last 30 minutes in different ways. So let's break this down, and maybe I'll even pause after this story, even though we just took a break, just to get some reactions.

But here's what I want to suggest to you anyway. If you're going to open a story about values, and I really want you to think about those, and you … maybe you have a good handle on what the values are in your community, and it's not necessarily something about prosperity, for example. That's fine. But I want you to think about it. So here, here's one way we can start the story.

Child development is a foundation for community development and economic development. Capable children become the foundation for a prosperous and sustainable society. Here we're putting community in contact with community development—not nostalgia. Here we're touching on the economy, which people care about. Here we're talking about child development and then we're showing that child development does lead to a more prosperous society, which we can support with data. So again, we claim the value of prosperity.

We're then moving this conversation along to talk about the brain. Now I know some people are sick of talking about the brain; I understand that. Some people don't feel like they get it; I understand that—what I do want to stress is that the idea of talking about brain architecture is something that does resonate with the public. And don't forget: The public is not you—we are the practitioners. We've been hearing a lot of this, but we haven't necessarily been practicing it.

[42:34] Here you start talking about the brain. The brain gets built, right? Brains are built from the bottom up. This is the sense: That's skill against skill, right? What … when kids learn they learn more. The brains build. Kids are not born wholly formed. People really … some people really believe the brain comes out, and the kids are wholly formed from the start. They're not. And we know that—I mean look, you can blow a raspberry on a newborn's stomach, and that creates brain cells. So we know there's a lot that can go on in utero, [age] 0 to 3, and beyond.

I read about a study last year that said—I should pause and say this will not surprise any of the women on the phone—but that the male brain develops into the early twenties. So you know, we have a lot of work we can do. Having two boys at home, I'm certainly aware of that.

But again, brains get built from the bottom up, and there is a serve-and-return element to this, right? So genes change, brains change, development changes by the serve and return. You know, this is a tennis metaphor; it may not be ideal where you live, but the idea is you hit the ball to the kid with some sort of skill or something; they hit the ball back to you, and you are building children. And we know that's how it works. We … That's how it works when things are going well.

So again, big value: prosperity! Touching on the brain, right? Touching on how brains get built, touching on genes. We're getting into the issue, which is the next level of order, right? Then we move the conversation to: Look, this conversation's important too because we tend to focus on academics, right? People really want to talk about academics, "leave no child behind," for example. Testing. But we know that if we're going to sort of build the sort of kids that are going to be successful, it's going to be more than academic.

It's going to be social, cognitive, and emotional, and I always say this. You know, my older son is a rock star so far in school, spelling tests, math, all of that, but he doesn't really want to play on the playground. So, I mean, that's a concern for me. Academically he's doing great, emotionally he's got to catch up.

Now here's what I want to start to stress. We're talking about building kids; we have not yet talked about abuse, right? And we have talked about the fact that a prosperous society, an innovative society, is built on building kids, and there's probably better language than that. We have not talked about abuse yet. But this is where we talk about it. Right here [on slide], number 6: toxic stress. I'm going to talk about what that means in a second.

[44:50] Undermine … the damages of developing brains leads to all sorts of problems both short-term and long-term. And for folks who don't know the ACE [Adverse Childhood Experiences] study, this is where the ACE study is incredibly important. What I want to stress here—some people think stress can be good, some people think it can be bad. I think that's fine also.

But that's not what we people to think about when they're talking to us. What we want to talk about is child abuse and neglect. But we know that child abuse and neglect can be tricky as far as people wanting to actually have that discussion. So what we do is we position it or frame it as toxic stress. Something that is extreme—and we can say: "Toxic stress, like child abuse, affects development."

Here's what we have then in this story. You can tell this story in 10 minutes, you can tell it in 20 seconds. You want to have the kind of society you want to live in. You want to build the kind of children and families and communities that make that society possible. But child abuse undermines it. Toxic stress undermines that and damages our work.

I want you all the think about this story line and how you usually talk about your work. And then the payoff down here is sort of the policy payoff, as I talked about with order, is that, look, brains change over time, behaviors can change. So if we can get things right early it will be less costly to society and individuals than trying to fix it later. This is sort of a pay-now or pay-later image, and this should appeal to funders and politicians, though I know a lot of politicians sometimes can only focus on the next election.

[46:20] But, look, if we don't stop abuse now, we are not going to have the kind of society we want. Or we're not going to have the kind of people we want. People who are productive at work, people who strive in school, people who don't spend up health-care and mental health bills. And these are things that people care about, so I just want to make this story line for you, right?

We want to build a prosperous society that's of value. We care about children and how children grow. That's an issue. Child abuse can undermine that—the toxic stress of child abuse. When we do that, when we don't invest then and try to stop child abuse, we all pay later. Both as individuals and as a society. This can be a very powerful story if/when, you know, we do it right.

So, Carla, if you don't mind, can we just pause there for a second and give people a minute or two to see if anyone wants to jump in?

Carla: [47:02] Absolutely, thank you. Once again, if you'd like to ask a question it is star 1.

Ms. Nussbaum: [47:10] Ben, this is Jean, and there was one question that came in online, and the question was, "What is the best way to pop the family bubble?"

Mr. Tanzer: [47:13] Well, let me say, without trying to sound like I'm avoiding the question. The most important way to start that is not to invoke family at the beginning of every conversation, every letter … The idea is to build family into your larger discussion about values, about community.

You know, if we come out and say: "We're doing this for families, we're doing this for families, we're doing this for families," people are going to say, "I'm not comfortable doing things for families. I don't even know if families should be asking for help." And if you talk about the larger community, if you talk about what the community needs, if you talk about what Florida needs right now; if you say, this is how we can build a better Florida (sorry, Dr. Norris, you happened to speak first). You know, if we talked about that then we can talk about families.

The idea is—I really want to put this out for folks—molding the story is as important as anything, and so "family" is a trigger. It doesn't mean we avoid it, but it means we've put it into the larger story, right? So, when you talk about some of these values, you can't do one without the other. "Toxic stress." You know, this is where you talk about families. Families pay a key role, but, again I want to stress this, families are only one actor in the larger picture.

[48:28] So I think what's important—and you really can do this, you can do this in an elevator speech—is to keep putting family in context. We want to support families, but what we also want to do is support communities because we know that all sorts of actors in the community support children and influence children.

So again, we can't leave things standing, like, "We can prevent abuse." What does that mean? It's got to be in context. We can't just throw families out there. And I think this is important; you know, we like to say we are all about families, or it's all about families, or families are the most important thing. But it's not clear to me that people are comfortable with that. So I want you all to think about that. Put families into a larger conversation. You know: What does Florida need or Minnesota need or New York need or Illinois or Iowa?

You know, we need a lot things as a State; families may benefit from that. But, really, communities benefit, which means that the families in those communities benefit, which means their children benefit, and I just want you to think about the story as you go along. Think big, get small, build families into your story, don't lead with it.

Any other questions, Jean or Carla? I just want to make sure we pause here, and I really … I'm not expecting people to sort of get this or say, "Aha! He has handed us seven key points, and it's all over," but, you know, think about these things. I hope we can reconnect in some fashion, and Melissa and Jean, whomever, can think about the best way to do that.

But anything else right now? Because I want to jump ahead. I want to break down some of this and then I wanted to give you some other things to think about.

Carla: [49:55] We do have an audio question from Nancy.

Mr. Tanzer: [49:58] OK, I'm sorry, I didn't see that at first. Is it on my screen?

Ms. Nussbaum: [50:00] No, it just comes to the operator, Ben.

Mr. Tanzer: [50:04] Oh, OK, thanks, sure.

Nancy: [50:06] So my question is, that, umm … We probably tell our stories to different audiences with different goals in mind.

Mr. Tanzer: [50:15] Sure, of course.

Nancy: [50:17] Yeah, so I just wondered if you had any comments about maybe how you'd think about your story if you're talking to a general community meeting, your talking to a group of professionals who this may be actually relatively new to.

Mr. Tanzer: [50:34] Great point, that's a wonderful point. Umm, let me say two things and then react to those, and we'll play it out for a second.

I'm going to argue for all of you that sort of the big value piece of this, the level 1 piece. That is really an umbrella for whoever you're talking too. That whether you're a professional or a community person, whoever you are, you hold similar values. Especially if you're talking, you know, to someone in your community or State. So I want to push you to think of a way, and we'll help if we can, you know about what that sort of value is that everybody holds. People really do hold similar values, whether it's prosperity, ingenuity, spirituality, whatever that is—that's going to stay the same.

What I think you need to then focus on is what you think this group needs. What are they looking for? What's going to be the appeal to them in terms of family? I mean, for example, if you're talking to professionals, let's say you're talking to a group of doctors. Well, doctors want to keep health-care costs down, so the prosperity or economic argument really applies to them because they don't … they certainly benefit from having more patients, but they don't benefit from having an endless series of people come in for health care they can't pay for.

[51:50] You know, a group of parents are concerned, I would think, not just about their kid but the impact of all kids in the community and what all kids need—even something as simple as they know there are kids in their classroom that disrupt their own kids' ability to learn and grow. So I think it's really important for you, for all of us, as we start to target audiences to think about what that audience's primary concern is.

If it's a politician—outside of votes—their concern would be: How do I keep costs down in a variety of ways and/or drive things to my community? So a politician, I would think, is going to be very interested in an economic argument, right? And so, for example, I would still talk about prosperity or ingenuity, and I would say, look, PCA America (this is on our website), you know, has a study that shows the amount of direct/indirect costs when we don't prevent child abuse and neglect.

Politicians care about health care despite the larger health-care debate going on and how it's going to play out. They care about it from a financial angle. So I just challenge all of us, and we're working on this too, to keep asking yourself … OK, I've got an umbrella, [which] means, I've got a story—what does this group care about? You know, every group cares about something, and I would argue that you can connect what they care about to prevention. And you can easily wrap this story around what it is they think their concerned about.

I would also say you're going to run into folks who don't think parents are doing their job. But that's not the conversation you want to have with them anyway. You want to have a conversation about what their own communities need and what your community needs. And I'm going to say this; this came up in a training I was doing recently. You need people to buy in to your story and have them organized so they can make points with you. And we're going to talk a little bit about that in a couple minutes. But is that a helpful start to your question?

Nancy: [53:35] It is, and I would like to just throw in one more thing that you just got me thinking about as I've been listening, which is, you know, given what we know about the prevalence of abuse and neglect, that any audience is going to include people who have been directly affected.

Mr. Tanzer: [53:52] Absolutely.

Nancy: [53:53] And that affects how they hear what we're saying.

Mr. Tanzer: [53:55] And that's an excellent point, and I'll share an example with you. You know, I was doing a training, and some folks on this call may have been there. And I talked about this sort of stranger … the myth of stranger danger and, really, you know, the fact that it can sort of undermine what you all are trying to do, and someone raised her hand in the session, and she said, "You know, my son was murdered by a stranger." Which is really, obviously, very upsetting, and you know I tried to put … say it contextually, and I said, "I'm really sorry about that, and I always try to stress that we know that happens."

And then she said, you know, "The reason I'm raising my hand is not because I'm upset you brought that up, but I'm upset that people still question the fact that what happened to my son is not the norm." You know, and so, she's actually become an advocate, going against the stranger-danger myth because as she learned more, she recognized that in fact when people talk about that they're spreading some false information about prevention.

So I think we do need to be prepared for having folks in the audience in a variety of ways. Which I also think the more we talk about what people value and what people need, the folks in the audience, whoever, wherever they come from, know that the point you're trying to make is: We believe in innovative programming that really helps communities and families.

I have to move forward. That was a great question, and we'll pick some more of this up but, hey, Carla, I'm just going to jump forward, OK?

Carla: [55:13] Thank you.

Mr. Tanzer: [55:15] Sure. So here's some things. These next couple of slides are great, but I'm not going spend as much time on them, these just sort of reinforce what I was just talking about and give you some more to think about now and when you're off the call.

But you know in essence I share tested values. This page here are values that we have tested. There's data behind it. You can find it in those research studies I mentioned earlier. Prosperity, ingenuity—I think it's a very American thing. What I think is interesting about ingenuity is that the work most of you are doing is innovative. You're trying to create things that support families and support your communities and prevent child abuse. That does reflect ingenuity, and we should be able to sell that.

Stewardship and reciprocity, you know, these next two values, I think, are interesting because I think the President [Obama] has really embraced them. But this idea, that is, our responsibility as adults to steward the next generation, that the future, tomorrow's society, depends on what we do today. People believe this—I want to stress that, by the way, as you're thinking about your story. People may or may not have different feelings about parents or behavior or children or strangers, but they actually do feel that we have a responsibility, and you can invoke this, and you can tug at them and pull them into your story.

Similarly that we are responsible managers, I think, is an interesting theme right now with the economy as it is. But that we want to address problems before they get worse; we are trying to be responsible. When you use this language it will open doors for you, I promise. It will pull people in who are struggling to get into the conversations.

Similarly, I talked earlier about models, sort of metaphors and models you can draw. And I've touched on these. The idea of brain architecture is very much about what develops in children, and I'm going to tell you that people really find this idea intriguing. I'll also tell you that something like brain development doesn't test as well for a variety of reasons including it sounds too science-y. But architecture is something people remain fascinated by. Similarly, this metaphor of serve and return—I don't know if you're going to be speaking to a bunch of tennis players—but people understand that image. They understand that what you sort of push in gets pushed back, and as you do that you build things.

And finally I said they have toxic stress, you know, my boss hates that phrase. The guy in the office next to me hates that phrase. But it does continue to test well with the public; they understand that it is something more severe than what they think is OK, and what they think works. They understand that maternal depression, that poverty, that abuse really affects child development.

Now I want to stress, by the way, you know, sometimes what we leave out of these brain development conversations is that brains can recover, and children can rebuild those brains if they're damaged early on. But the point is, we'd like to prevent it before it occurs, and we certainly want to be in the position to help if things have already occurred.

Now here I have a couple of things. This is language for you to play around with; I'm not going to get lost in this. But before I was talking about the "what," sort of brain architecture. Here's a paragraph that you can sort of play off of in the future and …

Ms. Nussbaum: [58:05] Ben, I don't think the slide has advanced.

Mr. Tanzer: [58:12] Oh, I think it advanced in front of me. So you don't have a slide that says "The What"?

Ms. Nussbaum: [58:15] No, we're on slide, it's 5, 6, and 7 of the reframing.

Mr. Tanzer: [58:21] Oh, because mine have been advancing. So how do you deal with that?

Ms. Nussbaum: [58:25] I'm not sure because I have …

Mr. Tanzer: [58:28] I can try to go backwards, and you can tell me if that helps. I'm going backwards. Do you see the screen I have now where I'm on the …?

Ms. Nussbaum: [58:40] We're still on 5, 6, and 7.

Mr. Tanzer: [58:44] And I apologize because I obviously have no idea why that is.

Ms. Nussbaum: [58:46] I've had this happen recently …

Mr. Tanzer: [58:50] It froze. Let me ask you a question. I brought myself back to that slide and now …

Ms. Nussbaum: [58:53] What I'm going to do right now, Ben, is actually pull up it on my end and see if I can do it for you from here, and you can let me know when to advance the slide.

Mr. Tanzer: [59:05] So how will I know when you've done that?

Ms. Nussbaum: [59:08] Everyone will see. I'm going to put us on the "What" slide.

Mr. Tanzer: [59:12] Great, now. OK. So I just should hop up to the "What" slide, right?

Ms. Nussbaum: [59:16] Actually, I'm going to take the presentation away from you and then we'll see that …

Mr. Tanzer: [59:22] That's all right. OK. I can roll with that … OK, so let's go on. [Laughs] So is this the slide now that everyone can see? And that's your arrow?

Ms. Nussbaum: [59:31] It should be.

Mr. Tanzer: [59:33] OK, well, I'll work off of that. We can just work in tandem then?

Ms. Nussbaum: [59:36] Yes.

Mr. Tanzer: [59:37] OK, so I'm going to move through these next couple of slides, Jean, kind of quickly. Less because of time and more because this reinforces some stuff—I really want people to read them.

So what I provided everybody is the "What" slide, and this really just breaks down some of the language you can use when you talk about the brain. Can you go to the next slide?

[01:00:05] This is the "How," right? This is that sort of serve and return. Here's some language about talking about how we … how children experience things, how we help build kids and build their brains and what that means. Can we go to the next slide?

These are the conditions, so this is a way to talk about toxic stress in a way that we know that the public has responded. I want to say, by the way, that people really get stuck in this sort of tolerable stress image that, you know, there's good stress/bad stress; kids can tolerate certain things. All true. Toxic stress is something else, and it does lead to lifelong situations and problems that we want to be able to address. Next slide.

So here's a couple of things. I know people love lists, and I know they love dos and don'ts, so I threw in a couple of dos and don'ts for all of you to play with—for folks who are looking for some of this to be boiled down. The FrameWorks people were very helpful here. Again, this is reinforcing what we talked about. You really want to prime your conversations, as I said, with values like stewardship and future and responsibility. You want to use the language of ordinary people.

I know you all know that but again we don't want to get caught up in too much science (no offense to the scientists) or too much jargon and acronyms. Talk like you talk at home. You know we don't want to overtly … You know, we want to move away from things that are not specifically cognitive and observable. You know we really want to talk about social and emotional development. People need to know there's more going on or could be more going on than a focus on academics.

As I mentioned we want to talk about the future. I mean, we want to talk about the fact that if we don't make investments now and do things now that we know there are long-term repercussions. And we really want to talk about this idea that there are many actors in children's lives. I know I've come back to that again and again, but that is one way to get around the family bubble. And that is real. You know you really want to talk about early care or preschool. If that's what you're talking about, it's something that everyone has accessible to them that we're really trying to create equal opportunities for all children.

As I mentioned, when I make community actors visible—and this is another idea, right? We're actually working on a video right now, but we want people to see that other community actors are involved. And part of your job is not just to talk about that but make them visible. You know, sometimes the best person you can have speak at an event is a police officer or a fire person, you know, a CEO. You know, feel comfortable moving beyond the usual suspects when you talk about children and children's development. Because all of these people play a role in children's lives. And again, as I was just starting to say, whenever possible connect children to the larger environment. They live in a world outside the home, and I think people lose track of that.

Jean, let's hop to the next one.

[01:02:40] So, here are some of the don'ts. Obviously many of these are antithesis of the things I was just talking about, but here's what you don't want to do. And what you don't want to do is not start with values, one; but two, you don't want to get into stuff like school readiness—and by the way the phrase "school readiness" is very tricky if you're using it. I'm guessing things like "ready to learn" tests better, but "school readiness" tests very poorly. It gives people this sense that mothers would rather not stay at home with their kids. I know it's 2010, but this comes up a lot.

You know, we want to talk about brain architectures; we want to open with it. Again we don't want to keep talking the language of experts, we don't want to focus just on academics. We don't want to extort people, right? When you talk about the future, it's not to say, "If we don't do 'x' youth crime will go up." What we want to talk about is: "If we don't make investments, there are long-term impacts." You don't want to focus too much on parents being super competent or incompetent.

[01:03:30] Again, people have a problem with parents and how they discipline. Let's get out of that conversation. Similarly you don't want to talk about child rearing as something that only works if resources or education exists. Because you know it doesn't always exist, right? But we can still support parents and families.

And finally, we've got to be careful around reinforcing that family safety or individualism frame which I've talked about. Family is problematic, less than context. Safety is problematic, less than context. And as I've said this before, and I want to come back to this a couple of times, the more we focus on individual change and individuals, the harder it is to have a larger conversation about society and community. And I think that is a place we need to push to, all of us, which is: What's best for society. It takes individuals to make change. We're not necessarily talking about individual policies, we are talking about larger policies and things you all probably fight for all the time.

Jean, let's see what's next, now that you're in charge.

So, hey, here's some things I would've shown you on my computer, but now I'm nervous, and I don't think I can do this. Jean had shown me how to go on the Internet and show you some of this stuff, but we may have lost that because it looks like my screen … something froze.

But, at preventchildabuse.org, it's under the "about us" section. But here's a link that's a shortcut [www.preventchildabuse.org/canp ]. We have put together a toolkit for all of you in conjunction with FrameWorks to think more and play around with this language and the things I've been talking about over the last 40 minutes. So the elements of the core story, which I walked you through, which is apparently where we got stuck. That is in there. There are talking points that are reframed talking points. I would love you to spend some time on those.

We did something unique, which I'm really excited about, we wrote a series of frequently asked questions, and we gave you sort of a "Here's how you probably usually respond"/"Here's a reframed response." It's very good stuff. There are sample editorials and letters to the editor in this toolkit. There are case studies about people struggling with framing.

And that is all available. We want you to use it. As I said, it's posted to our website, Prevent Child Abuse dot org. There is the actual link up above, if you have any problems getting into that let me know. The other thing in that toolkit is what I referenced way back on slide number 3. All the research this is built off of is all available to you. And I really hope you use it.

Hey, Jean, let's hop forward.

So here we've been talking about framing. And we've been talking about framing and messaging and storytelling from the perspective of: The field needs to do some things different; we need to reframe our language; we need to tell a new story. This is what I spend all my time on and want to support all of you in doing.

One thing we at PCA and others and certainly me personally have been thinking about a lot is that we have spent the last 6 years in some ways, and especially in the last year or so, getting this research up to speed. Giving all of you and all of us language to play around with, to think about, to engage people with. But, you know, I would argue, and this doesn't disagree with anything I've already said today, but, I would argue that that messaging is ultimately only as valuable as not only all the other things you do, but—if we're going to get the public involved, I really want to keep pushing this—you know, I want to connect with legislators and funders.

We should spend time thinking about what it means to create a larger movement around prevention. How do we get your neighbors, your friends, your family to care as much as you do? Because I don't think they do, and I don't think it's because they don't want to; they haven't made that connection. We talked about that cognitive disconnect.

So I started thinking, and I'm not the only one doing this, obviously, but I started thinking about what it means to create a movement. And so I found this article, and I’ll put the link up for you. Again, I won't risk trying to show you that article, but if you go to this, this PDF here [www.vcn.bc.ca/citizens-handbook/movements.pdf ], there's a wonderful article, and it's not the only article. There are many good articles, and in fact the FrameWorks Institute—and I encourage you to go to their website as well, which is on one of the slides—is also talking about social movements.

But when I went to this, I found this great article by this guy Charles Dobson. He talked about what we need to do to make movements. So what I found fascinating was he spent a lot of time, and you'll see this, talking about the need to come up with the right frame and the right message.

So, you know, for me certainly if reinforced that we are doing the right things, but he also pushed some other themes, right? That if you're really going to engage people you've got to have the right message and tell the right story. But you've also got to do other things. You've got to figure out who's already been doing grassroots organizing on either your issue or other issues, right? You've got to find small groups that care about your issue and, you know, provide kindling, get them excited. You have to find people who are familiar with other people who care because that gets them more interested in your cause.

And I've got to take a moment here [refers to slide] on both "familiar members" and this next point, co-optable, I'm sorry this is big words kind of, but this kind of "co-optable communications network." The idea is when you're going to organize is that things already exist, and that's the subtext to this slide. Things are already in place. I would argue that the framing stuff was not in place, which is why we spent time on it. But now we've got to think widely and see how that messaging gets complemented.

So here are the things, right, that we're looking at: Who's already been organizing? And you all know people in your States who've been organizing. Where are the small groups? How can we get them excited? Who's familiar with who? What's the co-optable communications network? What this means of course, is, What's already in place? What's already in place, how are people already talking? And I want to stress this because you know we're in this new era, which is not going to seem so new to anyone, especially if you have kids.

But anyone, anymore, completely different conversation than it was even a year and a half ago. But we live in a new universe of social media, which means people are unbelievably connected in ways they weren't and more easily, so, and, of course, some of it can be very silly if you've been on Facebook and, you know, your prom date drops you a note. That is not necessarily going to get you to do any prevention work, but you would not have heard from that person before.

But what I want to stress is there are all these tools all of a sudden that are free that people are going to—Facebook, and Twitter, and people are blogging. There is a network out there. It may not be set up, it may not be thought of yet as a tool for organizing, though people are clearly organizing, and we're trying to do it. But let's take advantage of that.

We want to build capable leaders, and I really want to stress this: We all have a role in building leaders not just in our organizations but in our States and our communities. And we've got to figure out how to get government involved. Sometimes when you talk about organizing, the sense is government can't do anything, and of course, frankly, it feels like that lately— government can't do anything.

[01:10:04] But, of course, they can do many amazing things, and you know I find it ironic that one of the policies that can be potentially hurt by the current health-care bill is SCHIP. SCHIP is an unbelievable success as far as getting more health care to more kids. So government can do a lot. We want to play a role in that.

So I've been thinking a lot about this, and, Jean, if you can go to the next slide for me.

So. I'm going to apologize a little bit. This is a … I feel like it's a little narcissistic, but I had a chance during the summer to work on an article for, I guess, we're calling them the QICs? Is that right, Jean?

Ms. Nussbaum: [01:10:45] Yep, that's the National Quality Improvement Center on Early Childhood, and so for short we call it the QIC-EC.

Mr. Tanzer: [01:10:51] Thank you because I would have never come up with the full name, and I've gotten stuck on the acronym, as soon as you said it to me I can't remember the name at all.

But at the link you see here … I tried to put together a paper on what it might look like to engage the public and how we might build on what's happening around you, things you know about, and the messaging, which we really finally pulled together. And there was a question earlier about, "Well, how do we talk to different audiences?" and I'm glad you asked that, so what I've tried to do was think about what we could do around prevention and around building a movement in terms of different audiences.

Here's what I want to suggest to you in terms of policymakers. We need to define for people what prevention and child abuse and neglect really is. The solutions. Tying back to our framing work. We also need to make sure that people understand what the idea, the concept, of prevention is at all.

I say this as politely as possible, but research we did with Dig Communications a couple of summers ago showed a real generational breakdown in terms of defining prevention. So for seniors and boomers there was much less of a ready knowledge of what it means to prevent. They didn't grow up with it, and as you get to Generation X and the millennials, when you get the cillennials —or 18 to 29, maybe, Generation X, 29 to 40—those groups, they have a better handle on this. But we've got to define it.

[01:12:17] Second thing is, and some of this gets lost, we need to really delineate a policy agenda. When you all are in front of—and I'm sure you do this, but I just want to stress this—we've got to keep focusing on policies that focus on prevention. And one of my personal concerns and my seat is that I think a lot of folks at your level and at our level sort of get pushed or tugged into conversations that really aren't about prevention and prevention policies.

You have obligations to your funders; you have obligations to your States and your public; but we've got to keep pushing prevention things, right? Things around shaken baby syndrome and home visiting and maternal depression and all these cool things that we know are happening. We need to articulate the impact and not preventing abuse, right? We need people to understand the ACE Study, for example, and the study at PCA we did around the economic impact.

We need to explain that there really is a return on investment. That when we invest in preventing child abuse and neglect we can lower costs around a number of things, and we can heighten other things [such as] people's ability to function on a higher level. We need to nurture champions, you know; there are different champions for different things. You know it's not … again, whatever you're feeling is, it's not … what's the word? Maybe it's not a surprise that health care has taken the hit it has when the senator who's cared most about health care passes away, right? So who are the next champions?

I've got to stress this: We've got to show people evidence. There is more and more research out there that supports the work you do, and people need to understand that, and we need to translate that for them.

Jean, can you go to the next page for me?

I also want you to think about your own partners, as we're trying to do, which is why I'm glad Melissa and Jean invited me to do this. You know, you've got people you work with all the time, but I just want to ask you some questions for you to think about in terms of your own partners.

[01:14:00] Do they understand this messaging stuff, for example, that we are talking to and the tools for implementing them? Can you become ambassadors, not just for prevention but for the language of prevention? Are all the people you work with utilizing things like social media to its greatest extent? These are free tools, and I know sometimes it seems silly: You want me to go on Facebook?

What I can tell you, along with our director of marketing here and some other people, we have built a network through Facebook Causes, which is an application for Facebook focused on social causes. And we have 1.3 million people as part of that cause. We can message them all the time. Now I'm not sure if we're reaching everybody. We're going to evaluate that.

So, Jean, can you pop back a slide? Two slides.

I wanted to stress that you need to think about your partner's need. We want to develop leaders among our partners. All collaborative efforts require leadership, and it's not always "everybody's a leader." I want to encourage all of you to offer guidance and support to your partners in the areas where they may not have spent as much time thinking or doing things. I want you to think about, as you leave this meeting and you talk to other people, what are the overarching values and story of prevention that works best for you in your State, in your community? And how can you all start working together so that we're telling a consistent story?

I know there are at least 100-something people on this call. I'm hoping that we're going to start using similar language. I'm hoping that every time Melissa goes to meetings, she says, "Hey, we were working with PCA and so on and so forth, and this is how we're trying to talk about our work." That's what I'm trying to do all the time.

I want to really stress that you can't start too small. I know that can sort of be a drag, but we should all spend some time asking ourselves whether we have the right partners and the right things in place and where they are. I really want to push that we can all learn from our partners and their experiences. Everyone has done some of this in some ways, at some time. How often do we spend some time looking at the history of our State and other things that have worked and not worked?

Now, [slide] "general public," thank you, Jean.

[01:16:08] I want to push you on this to think about this. The general public needs to hear a new story. They need you to define child abuse in a way they "get it." They need you to provide prevention in a way they "get it." And I want to push you to remember that order matters, that peoples' brains work hierarchically, that you have an opportunity to tell them a new story. You need to meet people where they're at.

Now this is a classic Social Work—and I am a social worker by training—101 sort of phrase, right? Which is, where are people at emotionally and otherwise? So this is important, and someone mentioned, you know—you're going to have survivors in the crowd. Wherever people are at, that's where the conversation needs to start. That's the sort of emotional or cognitive part of this.

But I also want to stress: Meet them where they're at in terms of where they physically are. You know, I know that at least some enormous chunk of my friends, and certainly my nephew and his friends, even though they're probably in school right now, are on Facebook doing something. Posting an update, posting a photo, telling a story. We've got to go there. We have to go there and influence those stories.

I really want to push all of us, and this call is a means for doing that, and I hope there will be follow up, and I hope people will call me, and I hope OCAN and others, CDC (Centers for Disease Control), will want to keep talking about this, but how do we activate all of you? How do you activate all of the people around you to be messengers for this issue? We know that people are not talking about prevention or thinking about prevention the way we'd like them to do that. Let's do that.

With the general public, always push the return on investment. What does it mean to prevent? What are the short-term and long-term things we know we are protecting? Enhancing kids' ability to function in school. Enhancing the workforce. Lowering health-care costs. These are very real things.

Uh oh. Hey Jean, my slide disappeared.

Ms. Nussbaum: [01:17:56] Huh.

Mr. Tanzer: [01:17:57] Maybe that's just on my side.

You know, let's build on those existing networks. As I said, people already do meetup groups, and they go to book clubs, and they meet for lunch, and they organize around things. Let's get into those groups, and let's talk about our issue.

And finally, this is where we started. Let's tell people what they can do to help us. Let's activate them. Let them know when there's a policy decision or an important election in your community or State. Let them know that they can organize their Facebook friends, that they can follow you on Twitter and reTweet your messages.

I really can't overemphasize the fact that our goal is to create, you know, buzz and stories about prevention that further our cause. There's a lot of clutter out there, to use sort of a wonky communications phrase. We need to rise above that and part of that is letting people know what they can do and that is easy to do that.

Um, Jean, I think this slide is probably just contact information, but let's see. Yep.

So, this is my email [btanzer@preventchildabuse.org], this is our website [www.preventchildabuse.org ], this is the blog [http://preventchildabuseamerica.blogspot.com ] that we post entries to once a week or so. If you go to that blog you can find our Twitter … if you go to our website you can find our Twitter account, our blog, our Facebook friends page, and cause page.

I really want folks to connect with us and get our messages and talk to us. You know, since we took several pauses during the call, that we went a little longer as far as presentation, but we still have 10 minutes to keep talking.

I'm going to stop there for now. I'm interested in your questions, your thoughts, your pushback. I'm also interested in what makes sense for you and what worked about this call, and again we can have all of these conversations offline as well but, hey Jean, with that, maybe I'll turn it back to you and Melissa and invite people to talk to me or talk to each other or however you want to do this.

Ms. Nussbaum: [01:19:48] OK, Carla. I guess that means we can open the lines for questions. Right now I don't have any online, so if you could signal to folks on the phone that they can ask questions now.

Carla: [01:19:59] OK, and again, to ask a question press star 1; to take your question back, star 2.

[Silence]

Ms. Nussbaum: [01:20:13] Ben, this is Jean, and I have one question that's come in, and someone is asking: "Is PCA developing graphics to tell the core story?"

Mr. Tanzer: [01:20:21] Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. And we've got some money to do so, which was a big help. Umm, yeah, we're going to be working on a series of things over this year into next year that we will release and share.

We're currently working on something, and I want to thank … If any of our friends from Florida are on the phone from the chapter, I'm very excited that we are working with them to create a video or PSA [public service announcement] video that is capturing a lot of this language. And there will be a couple of versions of it. It's going to be very focused on sort of community actors. I'm happy to tell you there will be a famous athlete in there.

But it's really focusing on the language we've been talking about with a series of visuals. Those will be … We'll be making those as available as widely as we can. It's just the start. So yes, we don't have everything right now, but I do encourage you, you know, to get into that toolkit and take a look, and look at some of the things we're doing and see what might be helpful for you.

For folks who have not been on our micro site, Pinwheels for Prevention, I invite you to look at pinwheelsforprevention.org. We're using pinwheels as a platform to talk about prevention and where we want to go in the future. We're sort of moving away a bit—or maybe a lot—from the blue ribbon, which we don't want to minimize, but it is associated with abuse and abuse numbers. And we really do want to have a new conversation, so I don't have that in here anywhere, but pinwheelsforprevention.org will certainly be a place both currently and in the future you'll find things like that.

Ms. Nussbaum: [01:21:53] Ben, another question came in, and someone wanted to know how long you thought it would take to reframe America?

Mr. Tanzer: [01:22:00] You know, this is such a great question, in part because it's so frustrating. You know, I'm guessing—though I don't know if we know how to measure this yet, but we've got a good jump start, but I'm assuming this is a sort of—this is another generation.

You know when you see groups like Susan G. Komen, you think, "Man, they did so much so quickly." But, you know, that's 20 years in the making. I think we have a good start, and I think one thing we've learned more and more, which I'm really, really excited about, and I want folks to think about this on the phone with us.

This generation coming up, the millennials, again, this sort of 18- to 29-year-olds. In particular, and not to, as my son would say, dog any other generations, but they are, at least so far research is showing they are, very focused on social causes. They are the most active generation since the boomers. They are interested in making change, and they arguably don't have a cause yet that they love that is their cause.

I would really like to believe that prevention could be their cause. And I don't want to ignore any other generations, including the one I'm in. But, I think, to answer the question, though—I think what gives me hope is that the generation coming up, the next layer of parents or soon-to-be parents or current parents, the next group of policymakers and business makers, the next group of entrepreneurs—and it's a very entrepreneurial generation—they care about causes. They are the most comfortable in home visiting, for example, of any generation prior to them. They think that they better understand abuse and neglect, which makes it easier to define for us.

So I think we're going to see a lot of headway now. I think it's going to take us some time. I think it's a whole generation we've got to work through, but I think we have a generation in front of us that is really excited and interested about helping us out and being part of this, and I think it is incumbent on us to engage them in every way possible and give them the tools they need to get out there and make change and make change on behalf of us, and to show them, and I really believe this.

I think one of the things we have struggled with is that people don't necessarily see what they care about. I want you all to think about this. What they care about is connected to what you care about and I care about, which is prevention, right?

If people care about substance abuse, if they care about health-care costs, if they care about animal abuse, if they care about depression, mental health issues, the economy; I've got to believe in the environment in some fashion. I think we can connect that back to prevention, and I think the more and more we are able to do that, the more successful we will be.

So, I'm very hopeful that we're on the cusp of something, and I hope we can sort of grab it, and I think calls like this are a great start. I think, you know, Melissa and Jean and the people they work for and with need to be celebrated. I hope we have a lot more conversations like this, and I hope that they can become increasingly more tactical.

So I also hope you all will want to be in touch with us as we try to figure some of this stuff out. So I hope that's a good answer. No one has ever asked me that before, I'm just thinking about it now.

Ms. Nussbaum: [01:25:02] OK, Ben, I've got another question for you. The question is: "What if, instead of focusing on the problem, we instead try to just sell the solution? For example, if we know that early childhood education with parental involvement. Why not just sell that as the thing to do?"

Mr. Tanzer: [01:25:21] I think there's a couple of issues here, and this is, again—fantastic question. I think there's a couple of issues here. We do want to sell the solution. I think, though—and I want to stress this, and it is not a competition. You know, a lot of different causes could sell that solution as the means for minimizing or reducing what they care about. I'm sure folks working in obesity and substance abuse and homelessness could talk about that as well. And I am concerned (that may be too strong a word) that prevention of child abuse could get lost if we don't show that that solution is important for preventing child abuse as well.

So again, we don't want to run from child abuse, but I don't want … We don't want to oversell child abuse when we're making our argument, but I don't want to run from it. It's what we do, and I do think we need to carve out our niche.

Now I really do believe there's enough room under that child development and parental involvement banner for all of us. But I really don't—and I want us all to think about this, and if you think I'm wrong I'd like to talk about that—I don't want us to lose what it is that makes us unique because when we stop talking about child abuse and preventing it, no one else is going to talk about it. And if no one talks about it, it's going to affect our ability to pass policies. And so it needs to be part of the conversation.

You know part of what I've been trying to push today is: When's the best way to use that? But I really want to stress to the folks on the phone, let's not run from what we do, but let's talk about it differently. So, yeah, you do want to sell the solutions. But what you also want to see are the values. And you want to remind people that there's a reason you care about the solution. I think people need to hear why you care about it.

But I am really excited about any interaction or anything around that.

Carla: [01:27:17] Excuse me, but we do have a question online.

Mr. Tanzer: [01:27:19] Great.

Carla: [01:27:22] Whoever pressed star 1, I was unable to hear your recorded name so your line is open.

[Silence]

Mr. Tanzer: [01:27:51] Hey, Jean, I don't know if anyone is talking, I don't hear anything.

Ms. Nussbaum:[01:27:54] No, it doesn't appear that way.

Mr. Tanzer: [01:27:55] Not that I'm uncomfortable with the 30-second silence. But I want to make sure people know about that. We certainly have more time, though it's winding down. Well, it's not winding down for me, but I assume it's winding down overall. So I just want to make sure I'm touching base there.

Carla: [01:28:10] There are no further questions.

Ms. Nussbaum: [01:28:13] And I don't have any additional questions right now online either.

Mr. Tanzer: [01:28:17] OK, cool. Well, it's 3:29, so I will assume then that that's consistent, and people want to get their bonus minute, which, as a speaker, I want to give you that.

So I just want to stress again—thank you to Jean and Melissa for hosting this, and Carla for helping us out. I think this is one of the most important things we can focus on. Not because necessarily the thing that prevents child abuse and neglect, but if we can get our stories together we can speak consistently. Maybe we can get more people to the table, get more people to care about what you're doing day to day and support it and fund it and speak about it.

I hope folks will take a look at the framing toolkit, it's wonderful. I know people will take a look at our article. I'm not sure if it's as wonderful as the toolkit, but I hope it helps. I'm really interested in any feedback people have in working with us. We're very excited about what 2010 is going to hold, though, obviously, we're endlessly concerned about funding and finances and the economy. I do think a lot of neat things are happening.

So I also really appreciate any feedback or comments on the presentation itself. The content, if it works for you, how it works for you, what I can do better. Personally this is always a funky sort of way to do this, but I hope it really worked because we had such a big amount of people on the phone.

Ms. Nussbaum: [01:29:29] And Melissa—did you have any closing comments you wanted to add?

Ms. Brodowski: [01:29:33] I just wanted to say, thank you so much, Ben. I mean, I've heard parts of this at different times, but I think each time I hear it there's always something new to think about and incorporate into the work, and I definitely look forward to our continued conversations with you and the other national organizations and the CDC and other Federal partners in furthering efforts. So I just really thank you for giving us a lot of things to think about and try to incorporate into our day-to-day work.

Carla: [01:29:59] Excuse me, would you like to take one last question?

Ms. Nussbaum: [01:30:05] Sure, I think that'd be great.

Mary Young: [01:30:10] Hi, I just, I joined a little late due to training other children, but … question I have. I have started, and we just started this group of girls called Created by Design and it's geared toward building self-esteem, and so they have come up with different things that they'd like to get involved in. And I'm just wondering, is there room in the house, if you will, for young girls to kind of get involved in share their story or some activity that would help them to push the voice of preventing child abuse?

Mr. Tanzer: [01:30:55] If the larger question, and thanks for asking that, is is there room for, you know, sort of ambassadors and messengers at all levels? I think the answer is absolutely. And the question is sort of creating the right environment and forum. If the question is, "Are people doing this already, and how are they doing it?"

You know I might need to defer to other folks, but again I think the larger question is that, you know, we all come up with some consistent language, messaging, and storytelling that moves the larger cause. And moving the larger cause means that we should be able to and want to draw on anybody who's interested and thinks it's an important cause to talk about. Is that a good answer? That's a great question.

Ms. Young: [01:31:38] Very good answer, because I know these girls would love to be involved but just weren't sure what to do and if there's a place for them.

Mr. Tanzer: [01:32:52] Well, let me encourage you. If you go to our website, Prevent Child Abuse dot org, you can go under the "about us" or "chapter section" and you can find out who, from our network anyway, works in your State. And it may be that you give our chapter a call and see what they're already doing in this area.

Ms. Young: [01:32:10] That's great, thank you very much.

Mr. Tanzer: [01:32:12] Not at all, but chapters do amazingly cool stuff, and I probably haven't stressed that enough in this particular call, but there's a lot of very cool things going on around the country, big and small, on all levels of the community, and I hope more and more people try to get a handle on what that looks like in their home States.

Ms. Young: [01:32:26] Thank you very much.

Mr. Tanzer: [01:32:28] Sure.

Ms. Nussbaum: [01:32:31] Well, this is Jean. I just really wanted to thank everybody for calling in and participating in the call and all the wonderful questions that we had and to thank Ben for the wonderful presentation and Melissa as well for helping pull this all together.

I know that some people have asked us questions. I do want people to know that a PDF version of the presentation will be available once we have the recording posted, and you will be receiving an email with all of this information in approximately 1 to 2 weeks, once we're able to get everything posted up. So thank you again for all your participation. If you have questions, please email Ben and/or feel free to email myself, and you have my email address with the webinar invitation. So thank you so much, everybody, and I hope you have a wonderful afternoon.

Mr. Tanzer: [01:33:17] Thank you as well.

[End webinar audio.]

Return to the Federal Inter-Agency Work Group on Child Abuse & Neglect

Storytelling, Social Movements, and the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Webinar Presented by the Federal Interagency Work Group on Child Abuse and Neglect January 28, 2010

Storytelling, Social Movements, and the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect
Prevention Webinar Presented by the
Federal Interagency Work Group on Child Abuse and Neglect
January 28, 2010